NOTE: *On the third track, there is a mark that makes nine moderate pops.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in clean shape. Most of them will have at least some ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. Some will have cut corners. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG, and it will probably be VG+. If you are picky about your covers please let us know in advance so that we can be sure we have a nice cover for you.

With excellent sound on all four sides, this turned out to be one of the better copies from our most recent shootout. It’s not an easy album to find in clean condition, let alone a copy that sounds like this and plays quietly throughout!

If jazz-fusion is your bag, this copy will take you on a trip like few other records could. You hear right in to the soundfield, and you can be sure that there’s a whole lot going on in there. As Wikipedia notes:

The rhythm section for this recording consists of two bassists (one playing bass guitar, the other double bass), two to three drummers, two to three electric piano players, and a percussionist, all playing at the same time.

Critically important is the three-dimensional quality of the sound. On the better copies, the space opens up and the music comes to life. The clarity, presence, dynamics, and energy of these sides go far beyond anything you would be able to hear on most copies (and we would be very surprised if any Heavy Vinyl reissue of the album wasn't laughably recessed, opaque and ambience-free, since practically all of them are).

The remarkable musicianship and Teo Macero's innovative production help take these jazz-fusion soundscapes to places most audiophiles have never imagined they could go. And a copy as good as this one will surely take the entire production to a whole new level.

Our favorite track on this album, Miles Runs The Voodoo Down, is found on side four. You may want to get into the album through that one first.

What the best sides of this groundbreaking album from 1970 have to offer is not hard to hear:

The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space

The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970

Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low

Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre

Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Driving Rhythmic Energy

Sound that jumped out of the speakers, with driving rhythmic energy, worked the best for us. They really brought this complex music to life and allowed us to make sense of all its moving parts. This is yet another definition of a Hot Stamper -- it's the copy that lets the music work as music.

The top-flight musicianship and Teo Macero's innovative production help take these jazz-fusion soundscapes to places most folks never imagined they could go. And a copy as good as this one takes the entire production to a whole new level. I can't begin to tell you how many crappy copies have hit our table over the years, but after finding this one I'm really glad we never gave up on the album, as much as we might have liked to.

Have you noticed that first pressing jazz LPs, when you are lucky enough to run into one in this kind of top quality condition, fetch three to five times the price they did only ten years ago? We sure have.

What We're Listening For on Bitches Brew

Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?

The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.

Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks for the horns and drums, not the smear and thickness so common to most LPs.

Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering -- which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.

Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.

Then: presence and immediacy. Miles isn't "back there" somewhere, way behind the speakers. He's front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- legendary Columbia engineer Frank Laico in this case -- would have put him.

Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

A Big Group of Musicians Needs This Kind of Space

One of the qualities that we don't talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record's presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don't extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don't seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read "BIG and BOLD" -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They're not brighter, they're not more aggressive, they're not hyped-up in any way, they're just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that -- a copy like this one -- it's an entirely different listening experience.

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Pharaoh's Dance

Side Two

Bitches Brew

Side Three

Spanish Key
John McLaughlin

Side Four

Miles Runs the Voodoo Down
Sanctuary

Allmusic

Thought by many to be the most revolutionary album in jazz history, having virtually created the genre known as jazz-rock fusion (for better or worse) and being the jazz album to most influence rock and funk musicians, Bitches Brew is, by its very nature, mercurial.

The original double LP included only six cuts and featured up to 12 musicians at any given time, most of whom would go on to be high-level players in their own right: Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Airto, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Don Alias, Benny Maupin, Larry Young, Lenny White, and others.

Originally thought to be a series of long jams locked into grooves around one or two keyboard, bass, or guitar figures, Bitches Brew is anything but. Producer Teo Macero had as much to do with the end product on Bitches Brew as Davis. Macero and Davis assembled, from splice to splice, section to section, much of the music recorded over three days in August 1969...

Bitches Brew retains its freshness and mystery long after its original issue.

I remember buying this record when I was in college. I had a hell of a time trying to make sense of it back then. I also bought the first two Weather Report albums and had a hell of a time with those. But then when Sweetnighter came out in 1973, an album which was angular but still accessible, fusion jazz started to make sense to me. This is music for those who want to be challenged. That's as true today as it was years ago when this record came out.

Shooting Out the Tough Ones

These kinds of records always make for tough shootouts. Everything has to be tuned up and on the money before we can even hope to get the record sounding right. Careful VTA adjustment could not be more critical in this respect.

If we're not hearing the sound we want, we keep messing with the adjustments until we do. There is no getting around sweating the details when sitting down to test a complex recording such as this. If you can't stand the tweaking tedium, get out of the kitchen (or listening room as the case may be).

Obsessing over every aspect of a record's reproduction is what we do for a living. This kind of Big Jazz Rock Recording requires us to be at the top of our game, both in terms of reproducing the albums themselves as well as evaluating the merits of individual pressings.

When you love it, it's not work, it's fun. Tedious, occasionally exasperating fun, but still fun.

It took a long time to get to the point where we could clean the record properly, twenty years or so, and about the same amount of time to get the stereo to the level it needed to be, involving, you guessed it, many of the Revolutionary Changes in Audio we tout so obsessively. It's not easy to find a pressing with the low end whomp factor, midrange energy and overall dynamic power that this music needs, and it takes one helluva stereo to play one too.

As we've said before about these kinds of recordings, they are designed to bring an audio system to its knees.
If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound .